Update: Knowing that free will is just an illusion, how to continue living?

[MischievousMonkey]

@MyopicEagle



Maybe we aren't talking about the same thing but while we are wired like animals are, what separates us from them is the prefrontal cortex.

Animals have instincts that they are born with and die with. It's not a learned behavior. There are no experiences that make them not do what they do.

Humans have reflexes but not instincts, a lot of people get them confused.

A polar bear knows to cover it's black nose to camouflage in the snow, they don't look in mirrors, mothers don't teach them that. Coyotes know how to pounce on snow to grab a rabbit out of a hole.

If a baby is for instance fed up to the point where it can maneuver an mobilize (walk, crawl) and supposing it was in an environment with appropriate food sources, it could eat enough proteins, carbs, and maybe fats to still be able to live. But that's about all it could do is eat shyt and sleep .

Talking is a learned behavior (speaking a language) while communicating isn't. Long before we talk we can communicate. Reading writing all learned behavior and yes they are repeated often and consistently throughout your life.

Once you get past the very basics, the very very basics like the word yes and no. You have the ability to rationalize. Which is what separates us from animals.

You hand a dog a bowl of water, it's simple yes or no. For humans even if they answer is yes or no there is rational behind the answer.

No I'm not thirsty
I don't want 'that' drink
No I don't like that drink
The drink is too cold
The drink is too hot
Too sweet
Too bitter
Too sour

This is all rationale

You offer a dog water it'll look at it, smell it maybe take a sip and it either wants it or not. It's an on or off switch for the animal.

If you gave a dog water that was piping hot, the dog may want to drink and it'll burn it's tongue, it'll stop drinking. The pain is a reflex which will make it stop, through conditioning it may sniff more or put a paw in, push the bowl spilling some and test that to make sure it's safe. It's not using rationale, it's responding to stimuli.

Because of rationale we have consequences ( positive, negative and man made) which are more than just reactions to stimuli. For instance a dog can step in thorns and feel pain it'll learn through that interaction not to step there. Same for humans.

As far as interacting with others and living in this world, we as human have choices and have to make choices. You can choose to go to work or not, through learned behavior there are pros and cons. But you choose, not through instinct or reflex but rationalization .

There are certain things I don't get in your post, correct me whenever I'm wrong

All mammals have a prefrontal cortex actually if I'm not mistaken It's its complexity that is debated.

"Animals have instincts that they are born with and die with. It's not a learned behavior. There are no experiences that make them not do what they do."

I agree that animals have instincts but I disagree on the fact that no experience can change what they do. In fact, you seem to disagree with that yourself later in that post when you mention several examples of animals changing their behavior or acting over their instincts after a certain experience. And I agree. You can teach a dog. You can even teach a rat provided that you send them the good prompts. By stimulating their brain and the production of dopamine (giving them a piece of cheese)/inflicting pain, you can totally change their behavior, even if it goes against their primary instinct. They even learn crazy fast.
Octopuses are so smart that they can learn through observation, they don't even need to live an event to assimilate its lessons.



What's the difference between:

No I'm not thirsty
I don't want 'that' drink
No I don't like that drink
The drink is too cold
The drink is too hot
Too sweet
Too bitter
Too sour

who are all stimuli or absence of stimuli, and...

You offer a dog water it'll look at it, smell it maybe take a sip and it either wants it or not. It's an on or off switch for the animal.

If you gave a dog water that was piping hot, the dog may want to drink and it'll burn it's tongue, it'll stop drinking. The pain is a reflex which will make it stop, through conditioning it may sniff more or put a paw in, push the bowl spilling some and test that to make sure it's safe.

??

These are interchangeable. The man has a stimuli (example: I'm thirsty/It's too hot) who will prompt an action (example: I'll drink/I won't drink). Same thing for the dog. It's just that the human brain deals with a lot more stimuli: Example:

• I'm thirsty
• I'm in a comfortable position
• The water is too damn far from the couch

=> I won't drink (right now).

In both cases, stimuli that produce an action, whether it be drinking or not drinking.


So... That's that we're just talking complexity of the machine doing the learning and treating the stimuli here. Like comparing a casio or a TI-89 and a super computer.

 

[Turbulent]

 

[null]

For now I'm staying on some surface level shyt:

No such thing as liberty, responsibility, choice, guilt (edit:wrong word, I should have used "culpability"), merit...

Humans are (complex) machines, just like animals, who record informations and react according to them.

A man is basically a bundle of genes (predetermined) ever reacting to experiences (can't do nothing about them since they happen to him). This mix genes/expériences form the personality and can explain the absolute totality of the "choices", "decisions", "thoughts" a man will make, take or have.

This is why there is no responsibility: if someone does something considered good, it's because he was predisposed to do it according to his personal mix. Same shyt if he does something bad.
At no moment does he have a choice in the matter; for he never decided what his genes would be and how they would react to his life experiences.

The only reason we tell this lie of responsibility is because we need it to justify cleaning up society with people threatening it.

I doubt I'll ever change my mind about this but feel free to discuss.

That means that other people can make choices for you.

 

[MischievousMonkey]

2:02 dude just went himself to the right conclusion but can't cope with it, so he writes it off.

Was the other dude quoting Leibniz or did I misheard? Anyways, I agree with a lot of thing he said, but I feel like he didn't explain well the cope out Leibniz pulled. Yes, if you were to find one possibility where determination wouldn't fully work, it would make it impossible to prove. But he didn't show that by saying that determination and will happen at the exact same time and in the exact same way, because like he said, determination supposed you could predict everything possible, and that's not compatible with free will. You'd have to negate determination for free will to exist. They just cannot coexist.

 

[010101]

it's all cause & effect

individuals cannot trace the chain of causality in all cases & that causes them to fill those gaps with imagination

it really is like a everlasting row of domino falling

you are watching everything unfold from a first person perspective

*

 

[UpAndComing]

I took a Philosophy class in college and we covered the topic of Free Will. After extensive research and consideration, I came to the conclusion that Free Will does not exist.

Similar to your argument and what you term as "pre-dispositions", I made the argument that what we call a "choice" or a "decision" are actions based on the influence of a myriad of past choices and decisions that have been encoded in us. In other words, we are biased toward certain actions, that are influenced by past experiences. This negates the idea of an action completely devoid of influence.

Trying something new is the purest definition of free will

If you never swam before, there is nothing in your past experiences that would make you have a pre-disposition on learning how to swim. Fear is the only thing feeds off of past experiences or what you think would happen. Free will is overcoming a fear or pre-disposition so you can learn something new

 

[Elle Seven]

For now I'm staying on some surface level shyt:

No such thing as liberty, responsibility, choice, guilt (edit:wrong word, I should have used "culpability"), merit...

Humans are (complex) machines, just like animals, who record informations and react according to them.

A man is basically a bundle of genes (predetermined) ever reacting to experiences (can't do nothing about them since they happen to him). This mix genes/expériences form the personality and can explain the absolute totality of the "choices", "decisions", "thoughts" a man will make, take or have.

This is why there is no responsibility: if someone does something considered good, it's because he was predisposed to do it according to his personal mix. Same shyt if he does something bad.
At no moment does he have a choice in the matter; for he never decided what his genes would be and how they would react to his life experiences.

The only reason we tell this lie of responsibility is because we need it to justify cleaning up society with people threatening it.

I doubt I'll ever change my mind about this but feel free to discuss.

I would love to contribute to your discussion, OP. In order to understand your position more clearly, I'm curious, how do YOU define the terms liberty, responsibility, choice and guilt, as you are using them in the context of this thread?

 

[MischievousMonkey]

I would love to contribute to your discussion, OP. In order to understand your position more clearly, I'm curious, how do YOU define the terms liberty, responsibility, choice and guilt, as you are using them in the context of this thread?

Feel free to do so!

I'll try with my best English.

Liberty: possibility for oneself to realize an action one has decided if he decided to do so

Responsibility: load to be carried by who played or must play an (active?) role in its existence

Choice: (s)election of something amongst other things

I hesitated over introducing the notion of liberty in my choice definition This is Kanye West all over again. Is a restricted choice still a choice? Reducing the numbers of objects constitutes a constraint, but there's still a choice to be made, so I'll let it out of it for now.

Guilt: I edited the OP because I used the wrong term here. I meant culpability.

Culpability: responsibility of a negative deed

 

[KamikazePilot]

This is a very good topic OP

 

[MischievousMonkey]

Trying something new is the purest definition of free will

If you never swam before, there is nothing in your past experiences that would make you have a pre-disposition on learning how to swim. Fear is the only thing feeds off of past experiences or what you think would happen. Free will is overcoming a fear or pre-disposition so you can learn something new

I can think of plenty things. First that comes to mind is simply seeing other people do it. Couple that with curiosity, that is definitely affected by the genetic make up (in part responsible for the sensation of fear) and previous experiences that heightened or reduced this curiosity, and there you have it.

 

[UpAndComing]

I can think of plenty things. First that comes to mind is simply seeing other people do it. Couple that with curiosity, that is definitely affected by the genetic make up (in part responsible for the sensation of fear) and previous experiences that heightened or reduced this curiosity, and there you have it.

Yes but overcoming that fear and genetic predisposition to learn how to swim is free will, which is my point

 

[MischievousMonkey]

Yes but overcoming that fear and genetic predisposition to learn how to swim is free will, which is my point

You can't decide whether you'll overcome an obstacle or not, it's a matter of being able to do it or not. Some can and some can't. Only difference between them is socialization (experiences) and genes (in the case we're discussing, experiences only, since we're supposing the same level of genetic fear in everybody).

 

[invalid]

Trying something new is the purest definition of free will

If you never swam before, there is nothing in your past experiences that would make you have a pre-disposition on learning how to swim. Fear is the only thing feeds off of past experiences or what you think would happen. Free will is overcoming a fear or pre-disposition so you can learn something new

In this sentence, you are equating learning how to do something with the the decision to learn to how to do something. Why would one make the decision to lean how to swim?

You bring up fear and say that free will is overcoming fear. I'm not sure I understand that.

If your decision to do something is motivated by fear, then, in and of itself, that decision is not free of any existential factors.

People learn how to swim not too overcome a fear of water. People learn how to swim for fear of drowning. It is the fear of drowning that motivates people to make the decision to learn how to swim.

Fear in this instance impedes on free will.

 

[BlackJesus]

You didn't quote me correctly. I acknowledged what you're first talking about by using the word "considered". I did it on purpose, because indeed, good and bad are societal meters used for practicality.

Crimes are a societal thing. One crime in a society won't be one in another. I'm not talking about society, I'm talking about predisposition. I do agree that murderers and rapists are predetermined to do what they do. Now how we act about it is our prerogative as a society. The model we "chose" is believing in free will, choice, etc. so as to justify casting them off and punishing them, because it always was way more practical to do so for our societies.

Now please correct my argument, show me what you got

MyopicEagle,

Your logic has to be consistent in order for you to make an argument. You can't "consider" good and evil and put it into some limbo zone. It is either/or. Either moral choices exist or they don't.

A society is nothing more than two or more individuals. If you lived on a desert island with two other people. Killing the other two people would not just be bad for "society" it would be bad for you and affect your ability to survive in the island. Morality = practicality. They are not separate concepts.

OP the whole reason we live and are adapted to societies is survival. It is self destructive to murder and rape others.

You also conveniently ignored when I said whites enslaving blacks was predestined. Does that mean whites are predetermined to be predators and blacks predetermined to be prey?

Btw you are proving yourself wrong everytime you make the choice to respond to this post.

 

[UpAndComing]

In this sentence, you are equating learning how to do something with the the decision to learn to how to do something. Why would one make the decision to lean how to swim?

You bring up fear and say that free will is overcoming fear. I'm not sure I understand that.

If your decision to do something is motivated by fear, then, in and of itself, that decision is not free of any existential factors.

People learn how to swim not too overcome a fear of water. People learn how to swim for fear of drowning. It is the fear of drowning that motivates people to make the decision to learn how to swim.

Fear in this instance impedes on free will.

And overcoming fear is the act of free will